Overheard: Weiner's scandal not as bad because he wasn't a conservative

Yes, Weiner cheated, even if he never met the women he had “relash- communications” with. And cheating is bad. But Weiner isn’t a Defense of Marriage conservative who seeks to police everyone else’s sex lives. There isn’t the same kind of hypocrisy here as we see from anti-choice anti-gay politicians who get caught with their pants down.

Weiner may have cheated on his wife but hey, it's not "hypocrisy." He's not against abortion or same sex marriage, so no big deal.

For people like Maddow, Sanford’s flaw is not that he acted immorally, but that he expected others to adhere to a standard that he himself failed to keep.

This view of integrity is regrettably common, particularly among elites and the media. I have yet to see a news story that agreed with Sanford that his described his actions as sinful. Instead, most of them, like Maddow, do not condemn him for breaching the sacred bonds of marriage but only for appearing to have a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude.......

The problem is not with pointing out moral inconsistency, which can aid a person in readjusting their level of integrity. The problem is that this approach rewards those with low moral standards. Anyone with high moral standards is likely to come up short, thus opening themselves to the charge of being morally inconsistent (or in their mangled use of the term, a hypocrite). But I would prefer to have politicians who fail to live up to objective moral standards than to to have those who think no such standards exist.